White America’s sudden fixation on Nazi Germany whenever state violence becomes visible is revealing. When ICE raids intensified under Trump, many white Americans reached immediately for comparisons to 1930s Germany. They didn’t reach for enslavement. They didn’t reach for the Ku Klux Klan. They didn’t reach for Jim Crow. They didn’t reach for Native removal or Japanese internment.

America tends to treat decline as something that simply happens. Baldwin warned that it’s something the nation moves toward through repeated decisions. “America will destroy itself not because of what Black Americans do but because of what white Americans refuse to do.”

I’ve published my first course, Learning How to Read History, as the foundation of the Smart Brown Girl School. It’s a course about orientation, how narratives are shaped, why simplification protects power, and how patterns repeat when they go unexamined.